Intel's AI Struggles and Missed OpenAI Deal

TapTechNews August 7th news, Unlike rivals such as NVIDIA and AMD, Intel has not made a huge splash in artificial intelligence products except for launching some notebook computer chips with NPUs. This also indirectly leads to the fact that Intel's market capitalization is currently less than half that of AMD and even less than 3.35% of NVIDIA.

According to Reuters, Intel had a chance to acquire about 15% of OpenAI's shares for $1 billion (TapTechNews note: currently about 7.154 billion yuan) in cash seven years ago. At that time, OpenAI was just a fledgling non-profit research institute dedicated to the little-known field of generative artificial intelligence.

Insiders revealed that in several months in 2017 and 2018, executives of the two companies discussed various possibilities, such as buying 15% of the company's shares for $1 billion, or taking a stake in OpenAI and selling hardware to it at cost price, but Intel ultimately decided to abandon this deal.

Allegedly, part of the reason is that its then-Intel CEO Bob Swan thought that generative AI models would be difficult to enter the market in the short term, which means it would be difficult for Intel to recover the cost quickly, thus killing this deal. In addition, there is also the reason that Intel's data center department does not want to produce products for it at cost price.

The latest financial report shows that the revenue and operating profit of Intel's Data Center and Artificial Intelligence group (DCAI) have dropped significantly. Nevertheless, its Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processor has been mass-produced, Xeon 6 Granite Rapids is about to start shipping, and the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator is expected to grow at an accelerated rate in the second half of the year. Intel said that more than 20 customers choose to use Gaudi 3.